‘There is a dip worldwide in MBA applications’

Peter Tufano, Dean and Professor of Finance and Andrew White, Associate Dean of Executive Education, Said Business School, University of Oxford, speak to Ruchi Chopda and Shashank Venkat of Education Times on the current trends and the future of their respective fields.

How can international students, specifically Indians, leverage the Euro zone crisis to their advantage?
In business, both booms and busts give rise to opportunities. The current economic malaise will create opportunities for international students who are well-trained and creative. The exact form of these opportunities is not as clear. They could lie in finding new ways to channel capital across borders, starting new ventures, or simply being able to do “normal” jobs in an increasingly global world.

Have the fundamentals of financial education changed post the current economic crisis?
The fundamentals of a solid financial education have not changed markedly in the wake of the current economic crisis. A solid education should focus on tradeoffs between risk and return, appreciate how the rules of the game influence economic performance, and understand how institutional arrangements can influence incentives. Economic crisis over the last 15 years have focused attention on the extreme interconnectivity of markets, the extent to which incentives matter, and the compact between society and business. Curriculum is adjusting to these realities. For example, our Master’s of Law and Finance Programme probes how laws, regulations, institutions, incentives, and markets interact to fund governments and businesses.

How are universities across UK coping with the fall in applications vis-a-vis non-affordability of education for local students and tightening of visa norms for international students?
I can’t speak of general trends in UK higher education, but there is a dip worldwide in MBA applications. We are closely examining our programmes to ensure that best business education is delivered. The opportunities and challenges facing business are quite complex and students need education that goes beyond simple skills training. By tapping into the depth and breadth of expertise across the University, we can address these needs. For example, our Oxford 1+1 MBA Programme allows students to craft a two-year Oxford experience that combines depth of study in an area such as the environment or computing or contemporary India with the breadth of our highly ranked MBA programme.

The “Week of Action” has seen thousands of students protest against rising costs of higher education. Your views on how a middle path can be reached?
Higher education is expensive to provide. A vibrant higher education sector must continue to generate new ideas and insights in the form of research, which is also costly. There are some initiatives that can lower the cost of teaching, for example through online learning. If we want to make education available more broadly, we need to borrow-either in the form of government funding, or through government or private fellowships or loans-all of which would be repaid in various ways through a more educated and productive workforce.

According to a recent survey by Times Higher Education, Asian universities are increasingly challenging the domination of US and UK. What according to you are the reasons for this?
Higher education is increasingly becoming global. For example, international students comprise over 90% of Oxford’s MBA programme. This diverse class enriches the student experience. But this trend also means that students from US or UK will look elsewhere to study. At the same time, the growth of the Indian and Chinese economies creates great demands for business training and domestic schools. They have created excellent programmes to meet this demand. This suggests that rankings will be much more fluid than in the past. For business education as a whole, this is a largely positive trend-competition will force us all to work harder.

Source: The Times of India (Education Times), April 30, 2012

Bulk recruitments go thin at B-schools

While recruiters from financial services have retained their top position during placements at top B-schools in the country this year, the numbers they are hiring have gone down. As against taking 25-30 students in one go, companies, especially in finance and IT sectors, are said to be taking only 8-12 students each, on average.

For instance, ICICI Bank, HDFC and TCS have picked up only a handful at the ICFAI Business School, Mumbai, according to Hema Sisodia, dean (corporate relations and campus placements). “Bulk recruiters have reduced the numbers,” she adds. “These five or six regular bulk recruiters used to pick up over 35 per cent, but this year they have hardly picked 25 per cent.”

Similarly, despite picking up students in “decent numbers”, the Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (XIMB) says firms from the IT sector have reduced bulk recruitments. “From 25-30 recruitments last year, the figure for this year has come down to 8-10,” says Sabita Mohanty, faculty co-ordinator (placements). “This year, firms are making offers in a more focused manner. They are looking for the right fit. As a result, the numbers have reduced.”

Even a premier B-school like the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), agrees the placement scenario is “a little less buoyant” than the last year. “The number of offers per recruiters are likely to go down this year, with 18-20 being the maximum,” says Saral Mukherjee, chairperson (placements). “However, most of these will be international financial companies. We don’t know if domestic firms will follow suit.”

Management institutes had to invite more firms this year. While it invited about 300 firms, Mumbai-based K J Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research (SIMSR) has seen only 63 coming to its campus for placements so far. Another 20 are expected soon. N D Sharma, placement coordinator at SIMSR, says, “By now, we should have placed all our students like we did last year. But so far, only 85 per cent of the 120-strong batch has been placed.”

Seconding his views is XIMB’s Mohanty. “We had to work a lot harder on inviting firms this year,” she notes. “Some we took for granted in the finance sector took a skip at the placements. Which is why this year we saw 70 firms at our campus as against 50 firms, since the number of offers per firm have also reduced,” adds Mohanty. XIMB recently placed its entire batch of 220 students.

BCG top recruiter as IIM-A begins placements
The final placement process for the management batch of 2010-12 began on Monday at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). Global strategy consulting firms and international investment banks were invited to the campus in the first cluster. The Boston Consulting Group made the highest number of offers by recruiting 17. Others included McKinsey & Co, Bain & Co, AT Kearney, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Oliver Wyman and Accenture. The second cluster will be held on February 17.

Source: Business Standard, February 14, 2012

B-School Wisdom Out of Sync with Real-Life Business – India Inc. unhappy with syllabus

A year after top Ivy League institutes in the United States began revamping their MBA programmes, in the process challenging decades of conventional business wisdom, India’s top-rung B-schools are attempting something similar. An overhauled syllabus with new subjects thrown in and old ones scrubbed out is expected to be ready for 2012-13 at many premier institutes.

The Indian School of Business (ISB), Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A), IIM-Kozhikode (IIM-K), and S P Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR) are some of the schools attempting to bridge the gap between classroom wisdom and business realities. Subjects like ethics, corporate social responsibility and management mantras from the Bhagavad Gita have made a debut along with hardship stints in backward villages and mandatory internships with NGOs. That should come as soup for the soul of a battle-weary India Inc hunting for socially-responsible and innovative leaders, right? Not quite.

The view from industry is that most of the changes in the curriculum are cosmetic and do little to tackle the root of the malaise at Indian B-schools – that they serve to create an elite social network and are clueless about the way business is run in real life. Senior executives say the top-tier schools, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), are out of sync with corporates and do not have enough good quality research emerging. “Some executives I have spoken to find it hard to imagine that a student can grasp concepts of marketing without selling anything to anybody; or the concepts of operations if they have never spent time on a factory floor,” says Professor Srikant Datar of HBS, co-author of ‘Rethinking the MBA’.

The B-schools counter that India Inc is fixated on short-term goals, reluctant to provide information for research and has a limited knowledge base. “Our context is learning and not quarterly performance and that may be why there is seen to be no connect between our teachings and corporate life. But our corporates too are obsolete in their knowledge, yet we take their voices seriously,” says IIM-K Director Debashis Chatterjee. “Each of us has different mandates; the shared space is defined by learning. That shared space needs to be explored,” adds the professor. IIM-K is doing its bit to become more relevant by cutting back 10% of its regular content and making place for unstructured thinking.

The B-school is also working on breaking silos created in B-schools. These silos typically have specialised faculty for operations, human resources, marketing and other such fields. “We decided to change curriculum so that these subjects are integrated in some way,” explains Chatterjee. The attempt, he says, is to ensure that when students get into a company, they are able to integrate different functions for one goal. “In fact last year, 32 members of our faculty got together to teach one course over five days,” adds the IIM-K Director.

That is a step in the right direction, but many more similar measures are needed to convince sceptical Indian business heads. As A Mahendran, managing director of Godrej Consumer Products Ltd, says: “There is no real connect between the curriculum and managing real time business complexities.” K Ramkumar, group HR chief at ICICI Bank, derides IIMs as placement agencies. “Management is a skill and merely teaching organisational behaviour in classrooms is a waste of time,” he says.

The B-schools say it is unfair to expect a sea change overnight as the curriculum overhaul is still work in progress. Efforts are under way to de-emphasise a lot of what is referred to as the ‘normative’ part of courses such as theories and discussions within classrooms and including a lot more of the ‘subjective’ part; the latter pertains to dealing with people, learning how to negotiate and studying consumer behaviour. For instance, IIM-A has set up a ‘Negotiations Clinic’ course that is based on real-life experiences of negotiation episodes in organisations.

At SPJIMR in Mumbai, faculty member Harsh Mohan says 60% of the curriculum is now focused on learnings out of classroom. These include attitude building, rural visits, how to deal with multiple cultures and getting sensitised to people at the bottom of the pyramid. “We get our students to go and interact with organisations such as the Railways and municipal corporations to learn how to deal with unstructured environments,” explains Mohan. ISB is looking at introducing revised courses to develop leadership traits and emphasise on self-analysis. It is offering more flexibility in the programme structure to allow students to customise their courses. The effort is also to impart a global perspective by teaching students to manage situations of economic, institutional, and cultural differences across countries.

“The second major review process will be completed by 2012 and implemented from academic year 2013-2014. Currently, we are in the process of collecting data from all the stakeholder groups and, once this is done, the data will be analysed and further deliberated by the curriculum review committee,” says an ISB spokesperson. “The world has changed and we have now made it compulsory to review courses every year keeping the global economy in mind,” adds Debashis Sanyal, Dean, School of Business Management of NMIMS.

Similar efforts aimed at more diversity are on at other premier B-schools. IIM-K exposes students to a ‘spiritual quotient;’ the Mumbai Business School is introducing courses in philosophy that include along with the Bhagvad Gita and the Upanishads, eastern philosophies as well; and the Xavier Labour Relations Institute has a compulsory course called ‘ethical ways of running a business,’ for which it has professors who are not typical academicians but corporate practitioners.

But could the problem lie less with the institutes and more with insatiable students? HBS’ Datar says the best students in B-schools want to join management consultancies and investment banks that offer top dollar. So B-schools automatically tune their teaching methods to pander to their needs. “B-schools are focused on teaching students to advise and analyse and are not preparing them for entrepreneurship, leadership and action-oriented innovative thinking,” says Datar.

Adds TV Mohandas Pai, former head of HR at Infosys: “It is just a case of demand-supply scenario and the hefty packages offered by investment bankers have set the tone for compensation. The corporate engagement at B-schools is superficial.” Still Datar adds “We cannot fault the students on choosing jobs that they think will give the right fillip to their careers.” Atanu Ghosh, visiting professor in business policy at IIM-A, avers that the career choices are out of the control of the IIMs. “We do have students who join the public sector but if a large chunk chooses a line that will determine their course of life and lifestyle, we can do little about it. It is a market-driven economy.”

Santrupt Misra, head of HR at the Aditya Birla group, says it is difficult to heap all the blame on either B-schools or on industry. “The current curriculum has not kept pace with the changing business environment, and limited research in our academia has aggravated the problem. I must also say that industry is not forthcoming in providing access to its research.” That has to change – and perhaps has already begun to. Says Leena Nair, executive director HR at Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL): “We are now sharing case studies so that students are not dealing with a 30-year-old case. Instead of blaming each other, we should work together and influence key campuses.”

Source: The Economic Times, January 19, 2012

MNCs lose IIM interns to SMEs

Seldom do you see the likes of Hindustan Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline, Deutsche Bank and HSBC competing for talent with Calicut-based VKC Footwear, V-Guard, AVT group and non-profit organisations such as Janaagraha and Kudumbhasree. Yet, they were – during the recent Indian Institute of Management-Kozhikode (IIM-K) internship placements.

There, and in IIM-Indore too, students this year have shown they aint just enticed by the big brands and monies that global corporations offer. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and non-profits are attractive too, if challenging roles are on offer. About 15% of the 328 students at IIM-Kozhikode have chosen to intern with SMEs. At IIM-Indore, about 6.5% of the batch – 30 students – has opted to intern with SMEs in 2012.

“This is the first time these South-based (SMEs) are coming to the IIM-K campus,” said Arjun Mohan, member, placement committee. The reason, Mohan said, was that some of these companies wanted to grow their turnover five-fold in the next five years. And they wanted the right talent. If students get a taste of the possibilities with SMEs during internship, there’s a chance they might consider them while deciding on their jobs. Professor Ashish Sadh, chairman, placements at IIM-Indore, said: “SMEs bring a lot of sector diversity to the campus. They could be operating in businesses like e- waste management to carbon trading to clean water supply.” Firms, such as Gurgaon-based e-waste management provider Green Vortex and boutique investment bank ARC Financial Services, have recruited summer interns from IIM-Indore.

At IIM-K, Australia-based investment banking firm Macquarie offered the highest stipend of Rs. 160,000. But what worked in the favour of SMEs and non-profits was their job profiles. Sanish MS needed a lot of thought and “inputs from friends in the corporate world” before he decided to let an offer from an MNC pass in favour of one from VKC Footwear. “VKC has offered me the sales and marketing profile as any other marketing MNC would do. Apart from that, I would be working on branding their new product launch and ideas in the pipeline,” he said. “The other advantage I have over working in MNCs is that I would be interacting with the top management of VKC on a daily basis, which would expose me to the day-to-day management activity at an organisational level.”

Classmate Manju Nair U has accepted an internship with the AVT Group. “Many companies are looking to expand beyond the region (South), and such expansions would open up opportunities for more meaty roles during internship,” she said. Companies are dangling the job-profile carrot. Thomas Kadaven, general manager (HR and administration) at AVT McCormick Ingredients and AVT Natural Products, said: “Our company is on an expansion spree and we are looking at second-line employees. We already have first-line employees, who are the experienced people from IIMs. The second line is the freshers from IIMs who can add new and innovative ideas.”

Anjan Das Gupta, sales head of Eastern Condiments, said, “We plan to reach a turnover of Rs. 1,000 crore (Rs. 10 billion) in the next few years (from Rs. 5 billion now). And we need these graduates to give fresh insights for our business growth.” It was easy for the Kerala-based group to seek out candidates from Kozhikode.

Green Vortex, which was set up in 2008, has recruited interns from non-IIM schools such as Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, in the past. It offers 20,000 as stipend to these students for a two-month internship. This year, it not only took interns from IIM-Indore, but also visited the IIMs at Kozhikode and Lucknow. Shankar Sharma, co-founder of Green Vortex, said, “In a large company, they would probably work in a specific role and get limited exposure. With us, they can work in various domains such as sales and marketing, finance, HR simultaneously, getting a bigger exposure to running a start-up effectively.”

Himanshu Jain, one of the founders of ARC Financial Services, says: “A large investment bank may not involve candidates with every aspect of a deal. We, on the other hand, provide them exposure to every stage of the deal. They get to work on live projects, which add a great deal to their knowledge and understanding of the investment banking industry.” While the increasing lure of the SMEs is evident, candidates still largely prefer a big company when it comes to employment. “Compensation is one major constraint. We can’t offer them a salary like an international bank does. In fact, the stipend that we pay is also quite negligible,” said ARC’s Jain.

Source: The Economic Times, November 14, 2011

Undergraduate students baffled by IIM-Indore notice

The ambitious five-year integrated programme offered by the Indian Institute of Management-Indore (IIM-I) has left its takers astonished. After being selected to the first-ever programme that opens doors to an IIM after high school, the institute has said that all those selected will have to pursue a graduation degree on the side.

This has left them all worried about the standing of the IIM-I’s course. The letter sent out by the IIM-I Director N. Ravichadran, to those who’ve been picked to join the programme, states, “Pursuing a degree in the first three years by distance education mode while they are on the IIM Indore campus is a reality.” This has left candidates and their parents equally rattled. Doing their bit, IIM-I is also in talks with Indian and international universities who would join hands with it to jointly offer this course.

The five-year residential Integrated Programme in Management was initially designed in such a way that students could drop out after the degree course. But the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) nixed that plan by disallowing the institute to modify its governing Societies Act, which states that the IIMs are postgraduate schools. So, the exit route after three years was closed.

The course was touted to be a rigorous one, designed to be a mix of essential skill subjects – maths and statistics, history, literature and political science, biological sciences, languages, finance and accounting, economics and information technology.

Now, students will have to pursue a graduation degree on the side too. “The decision was taken after we realised that Indians are obsessed by the idea of a degree,” said a faculty. IIM-Indore officials were inundated with queries from parents about the validity of this five-year course that does not give a degree to their wards, forcing the IIM-I Director to clarify that the institute “is not empowered to give degree for any academic programme”.

Source: The Times of India, October 16, 2011

Three IIM-A students bag Rs. 10 million pre-placement offers

Cutting across the clouds of economic slowdown, the sun is still shinning over Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad (IIM-A). More interestingly, the shine is emerging from where the recession clouds looked the darkest – the financial sector. In the last two months, three students of IIM-A have bagged Rs. 1 crore-plus (Rs. 10 million) pre-placement offers (PPO) each from financial institutions. While two offers have been made by Deutsche Bank for their Singapore and London offices, one is from Barclays in Hong Kong. IIM-A sources said one of the offers is the highest PPO ever offered on the campus. Companies offer PPO to a student based on his performance during the summer placement.

Sources on IIM-A’s placement committee said the PPOs have come at a time when everyone at campus feared that the economic gloom would be reflected in the financial sector. However, PPOs proved otherwise. Sources said among the 380 students in the current second-year post-graduate programme in management (PGP), more than 50 have got PPOs. Many of these have come from retail and investment banking companies like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Nomura.

“Many such offers were made during 2009 when the average placement offer had come down significantly. The institute learned lessons and we were able to pull up the pay scales in 2010-11, but this year we fear them slipping again. However, the PPOs bring a sense of optimism but we are keeping our fingers crossed,” said an IIM-A placement committee member.

However, there is apprehension that the tide can change anytime in the coming months due to the unstable global economic scenario. “During the worst ever placement scene for IIM-A during 2009 slowdown, many offers were not honoured. This time though, we feel the recruiters were more confident while making PPOs. But, we have changed our placement strategy to lessen the slowdown impact,” said IIM-A Director, Samir Barua.

The institute is also looking at sectors and companies that are not known as traditional recruiters at the campus. “We are now expanding our reach and trying to get a diverse set of recruiters. We are looking at the core manufacturing sector and companies that haven’t been approached,” Barua said. The process for final placements will begin from January 2012.

Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), October 15, 2011

With Rs 20 in pocket, IIM-B students live the life of have-nots

Just Rs. 20 in pocket. Surviving on single banana for breakfast, rice dish from roadside vendor for lunch, biscuits for tea time. Not a life that you would expect the future CEOs from the most prestigious B-school of the country to lead. But this is what some of the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B) students experienced for a day early this week — just to know what it is to be poor.

As part of their elective programme ‘Inclusive Business Models’, 75 students were exposed to another world — that of people who live with just Rs. 20 per day (the below poverty line cut-off). The students, in groups of five, went to different slums in and around Bangalore, interacted with the slum-dwellers, trying to understand their lives and finally come up with suitable business solutions that can help them. Interestingly, some of them even went on to experiment what it is to live with only Rs. 20 to get a hands-on experience. “My strategy was to have two meals — Rs 10 each. But I wanted to make sure it was wholesome so I do not feel hungry. I could not get anything from campus for that much.”

“So I ventured into the smaller lanes outside the campus. I could get three akki rotis and two bananas within Rs. 10. I know it’s not possible for me to survive for a long time like this, but may be for a day or two. It was a life-time experience, it makes you realise the value of money,” said Justin T. “Mine was an abject failure. I found it was impossible to live with Rs. 20. I did not touch my car, used the mobile only to receive calls, went out to Bilekahalli market to get bananas, ate from roadside vendors, got low quality vegetables, yet it did not fit in,” said Varun Sharma.

While some gave up smoking for the day as cigarettes were expensive, there were others who gave up on luxuries like using a laptop. From understanding the aspirations of slum-dwellers to sending their children to English medium schools, students got a peek into the lives of the poor.

Source: The Times of India, July 17, 2011

>Students make money while the sun shines

>The summer placements scene at B-schools is hotting up. A vibrant job market — the job speak index of Naukri.com says companies’ activities related to the recruitment stood at 1,085 in March 2011 against 900 in March 2010 — and war for talent acquisition has made India Inc dangle the fat pay cheque carrot even for the two month summer internship programmes at B-schools.

This has resulted in an over 20-50 per cent hike in the stipends offered to the summer trainees at B-schools across the country. B-school students, as part of their curriculum, intern with companies of their choice during the last semester of first year. The internship programme could be from six to eight weeks for which they draw stipends too.

“As the economy is coming out of recession, companies are confident of getting more business. This is one of the reasons why we have seen an uptake in the number of offers and hike in stipend. Companies are looking at summer training as a vehicle for final placement,” says Munish Bhargava, Corporate and Placement Advisor, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT).

Delhi-based IIFT and Birla Institute of Management and Technology (Bimtech), have seen their average stipends increase to 25 and 51 per cent, respectively. IIFT has recorded the highest stipend at Rs. 150,000 this year.

“Companies are willing to pay higher stipend to get the best candidate. During the six-eight weeks summer training they watch the candidate for their aptitude and other skills,” said Professor Kanwal Nayan Kapil, Chairperson, Placement Affairs, Management Development Institute, Gurgaon. MDI has seen an average hike of 34 per cent in stipend this year. While the highest domestic stipend at the institute was Rs. 150,000, the highest international stipend touched Rs. 400,000. Last year, MDI students didn’t get any international offer. The average stipend was Rs. 63,000.

B-school candidates who successfully complete the internship programme are also made pre-placement offers or PPOs from companies. At the premier Indian Institute of Management Lucknow (IIM-L), the institute has seen a 75 per cent increase in the number of offers made by companies against previous year. During final placements companies which get an earlier placement slot, get to pick up most of the students. Thus many companies are left with no students to recruit. Summer training is a good vehicle for final placement for such companies.

Deepa Mohamed, Group head, HR and Training at investment solutions company SMC says, the company prefers to go for summer internships as it gives it access to a bigger talent pool. “We can access the students during the internship and judge whether they are best fit for the company,” says Mohamed. This year, SMC made summer training offers to three students.

However, Mohamed thinks Indian companies are still conservative when it comes to offering good stipend to B-schools other than to students from IIMs. For IT services solutions firm, Cognizant, summer internship program is so important that it has created an event called B’hive to test interns’ competitive spirit. B’hive, provides a platform to interns to meet Cognizant senior management and network with their alumni currently with Cognizant.

Source: Business Standard, May 5, 2011